In yesterday’s post on the Northern Independence Party, when I said that, “It is the lack of class struggle that in part explains NIP’s appeal,” that could be mistaken for implying that NIP is somehow a diversion from the serious business of the struggle for socialism. That was not my intention.
When there are mass struggles, class identity, not regional or national aspirations, matters more. Off the top of my head I recall the equal pay strike by women machinists at Ford Dagenham in 1968, mass strikes by dockers, car workers, steelworkers, miners and the first ever national building workers strike in 1972. Smaller struggles like Grunwicks in 1976 and the print workers at Wapping in 1986 attracted solidarity action from the wider trade union movement and were national news. And somewhere in there are mainly women workers in the Leeds Clothing Strike, Asian workers at Imperial Typewriters in Leicester and the national Lorry Drivers Strike and many more.
The Winter of Discontent involving the public sector unions in 1978/79 and The Great Miners Strike of 1984/85 were evidence of change. In the early seventies we were largely successful. By the end of the seventies strikes more often ended in defeat. Solidarity was harder to mobilise and by the end of the 1980s trade union power was shackled by anti-union laws. The left had been purged from the Labour Party and Blair’s New Labour was poised to take over where Thatcher had left off.
That was 40 years ago. Half the country have no memory of those days of struggle. They remember the fall of the Berlin Wall as the triumph of the West, albeit tarnished by wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Those wars fuelled Islamic extremism and the continuing misery in the Middle East. The subsequent refugee crisis fuels Islamophobia. #MeToo and #BLM show that for all our victories, the war against racism and sexism is nowhere near over. And lest I forget, climate catastrophe could conceivably mean the extinction of the human race. So does class struggle still matter? And what is the point of the NIP?
Class struggle matters because it is just as true now as it was on the picket lines in 1972 that the rich and powerful are screwing the planet and screwing us. We are the people whose labour provides their wealth. When we withdraw our labour they are nothing. Without them we are unstoppable. System change can stop climate change and a whole lot more.
And what about NIP? It’s not the messiah. But it’s not the naughty boy either. NIP has been criticized from the right and the left by people who have already made their minds up and miss the point that NIP’s audience is people who haven’t made their minds up yet. People who voted Brexit because they were the left behind. Then they voted Tory to “get Brexit done.” Now their parents are dying in care homes, their kids have lost their jobs because of Covid and the same old Westminster crowd are still stitching them up. NIP may not win many elections. But it can give a voice to the voiceless based on hope not hate and encourage people to remember their roots and remind them who their real enemy is.
NIP also matters because it helps to keep the dream alive. We cannot conjure mass strikes and demonstrations out of thin air. That will come from the work of the quiet revolutionaries and the unsung heroes beavering away, undaunted by the scale of the struggle. But we need to keep the socialist tradition alive in our hearts and in our minds. We need to keep the memories alive: memories of defeats as well as victories and lessons learned. And the first requirement is to bring socialists together, to talk, to argue, to save the hard won lessons of our past and plan for future struggles. If all NIP is doing is bringing socialists together that is enough for now. We will do the rest.